A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (22 page)

King George clearly was not well, but his doctor was at a loss over just what to do. A succession of other physicians were summoned, but all left equally mystified. Then came Francis Willis, an elderly clergyman who had been granted a medical degree by Oxford University. His treatment of the king was nothing short of torture. Doctor and patient were introduced in December 1788, two months after the onset of the king’s mysterious illness. George disliked him from the start. When Willis acknowledged that he had been a clergyman before becoming a doctor, the king grew angry.

“I am sorry for it,” he said with rising agitation. “You have quitted a profession I have always loved, and you have embraced one I most heartily detest.”

“Sir,” Willis protested, “Our Savior Himself went about healing the sick.”

“Yes, yes,” the king answered irritably, “but He had not £700 [a year] for it.”

Willis immediately concluded the king was “in a decided state of insanity” and set about breaking him, like a horse—his preferred method of treatment. The goal was complete and total submission. When the king refused his food or became too restless, he was put into a straitjacket or tied to his bed. Later, a specially made chair was used to keep him confined—what the king came to call with bitter irony his “coronation chair.” At one point, while George was strapped to the terrible contraption, Willis stuffed a handkerchief into his mouth to keep him quiet during a lecture admonishing him for his crude and inappropriate remarks about a lady of the court. Hoping “to divert the morbid humors” from King George’s head, Willis applied poultices all over his body that made him blister. A formidable array of medicines was forced down his throat—some making him so sick that the king prayed he would die.

In spite of Willis’s treatment, the king began to recover. And on April 23, 1789, a service of thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Public buildings were decorated in the king’s honor and shouts of “God Save the King” echoed on the streets. A Regency by his eldest son, whom the people despised, had been averted, making King George III all the more popular.

It might have been the devastating loss of the American colonies that sent the king over the edge, or the Revolution raging in France that threatened the very institution of monarchy. Most historians believe, however, that something else caused George III’s strange behavior: A rare hereditary blood disorder known as porphyria. In addition to severe abdominal pain, weakness of the limbs, and discolored urine—all symptoms exhibited by the king—the disease causes mental derangement leading to rambling speech, hallucinations, and symptoms of hysteria, paranoia, and schizophrenia.

Whatever the cause of his illness, the king suffered through two more brief episodes in 1801 and 1804. Then in 1810, when King George was a little over seventy years old, permanent insanity settled upon him. His eldest son finally obtained the long coveted Regency of the kingdom while the old king was confined to a meager set of rooms at Windsor Castle for the rest of his life. It was a sad spectacle, the nearly blind old man with a long white beard shambling around his isolated rooms. Only the badge of the Star of the Order of the Garter, which he kept pinned to his chest, offered any reminder that this deranged man was king of Britain. Neglected and forgotten, he finally died in 1820 at the age of eighty-one.

 

 

A
s her long and lusty reign neared its close, only two things seemed to frighten Catherine the Great—an empty bed and the ascension of her half-mad son Paul to the Russian throne. The empress soothed the first fear with nights of passion right up to the very end. Her second, and far deeper concern, wasn’t so easy to exorcise.

Though in all probability Paul was not sired by Catherine’s despised husband Peter III (more likely he was the son of Serge Saltykov, whom Catherine bedded during her lonely nights as a neglected wife),
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he showed all the most unattractive traits of the murdered tsar he considered to be his father. “This young Prince gives evidence of sinister and dangerous inclinations,” the French charge d’affaires noted when Paul was still a boy. “A few days ago, he was asking why they had killed his father and why they had given his mother the throne that rightfully belonged to him. He added that when he grew up, he would get to the bottom of all that.”

But while Catherine reigned, her nasty, pug-faced son would have to stew in his own resentment. As he grew older, Paul started showing signs of the unbalanced cruelty for which his nominal father, Peter III, had been known. Frederick the Great of Prussia, whom Paul greatly admired, found him to be “haughty, arrogant, and violent, which makes those who know Russia fear that he will have difficulty maintaining himself on the throne.”

To ensure that he never got there, Catherine secretly drew up a document bypassing Paul in the succession in favor of his son, the future Alexander I. Unfortunately, while rifling through his mother’s desk as she took her last gasps of breath, Paul discovered the document and immediately burned it. He was proclaimed tsar at age forty-two, right after Catherine died in 1796.

With four decades of impotent rage behind him, Paul took to his new throne with a vengeance. All the late empress’s fears about her son were confirmed almost immediately. In a macabre effort to honor the man he believed to be his father, Paul had the remains of Peter III disinterred and placed in a coffin to lie in state next to his mother. Thus, thirty-four years after Peter’s murder, the couple who loathed one another in life were reunited in death. Paul delighted in the irony. To further right the wrongs of the past, Paul ordered the men responsible for the late tsar’s death to serve as pallbearers at the joint funeral. And, while he was at it, he had the bones of his mother’s one-eyed lover Potemkin dug out of his grave and scattered.

Having settled these scores, Paul turned his unsteady gaze onto his new subjects. He was determined to control every aspect of their lives, down to the smallest detail. In a flurry of decrees, Paul established the rules of living for all Russians. He was particularly concerned about dress and appearance. He ordered that everyone should powder their hair and brush it up and away from their foreheads. Round hats, low collars, and tailcoats were all banned, and tailors, hatters, and shoemakers had to apply to the tsar’s enforcers for approved patterns. Fashion offenders were subject to arrest, fines, and jail.

The social lives of the Russian people were similarly regimented, with Paul issuing strict guidelines on what people could read, where they could travel, and even how they were to entertain. Rules were posted for behavior at funerals, weddings, concerts, and other social gatherings. If someone wanted to have a party, they had to apply for a permit. A police officer was always present at the approved event to ensure that proper standards of “loyalty, propriety, and sobriety” were observed.

“My father has declared war on common sense,” said Paul’s son during the height of his legislomania, “with the firm resolve of never concluding a truce.” It was a sentiment echoed by many Russians. In 1801, after four years of Paul’s insane rule, the tsar was assassinated, and peace finally came to a grateful nation.

 

 

O
n the surface, Gregory Rasputin didn’t seem to have much recommending him to Russia’s royal family. A greasy, drunken peasant, with the manners of a barnyard pig, and a staggering case of b.o. to boot, he was also kind of creepy. Some said the “mad monk’s” strange allure was in his eyes. “They were pale blue,” recalled the French ambassador Maurice Paleologue, “of exceptional brilliance, depth and attraction. His gaze was at once piercing and caressing, naive and cunning, far-off and intense. When he was in earnest conversation, his pupils seemed to radiate magnetism.” Prime Minister Vladimir Kokovtsov was less impressed. “When Rasputin came into my study and sat down in an armchair, I was struck by the repulsive expression of his eyes,” Kokovtsov wrote. “Deep seated and close set, they glued on me, and for a long time, Rasputin would not turn them away as though trying to exercise some hypnotic influence. When tea was served, Rasputin seized a handful of biscuits, threw them into his tea, and again fixed his lynx eyes on me. I was getting tired of his attempts at hypnotism and told him in as many words that it was useless to stare at me so hard because his eyes had not the slightest effect on me.”

While Kokovtsov was apparently immune to Rasputin’s seductive glare, Tsar Nicholas II and especially his wife, Alexandra, were enthralled by this bizarre character from the far reaches of Siberia. He passed himself off as a
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, a man of God living in poverty and solitude, offering comfort to distressed souls. Empress Alexandra believed his act and was convinced he was a holy man blessed with the gift of healing. She had seen for herself the mysterious effect he had on her ailing son, Alexis, who inherited the life-threatening, often excruciating disease hemophilia from his maternal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria of Britain. “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” the fraudulent monk had written the empress in response to her first agonized plea for his intervention in saving the life of the young tsarevich, who was in a dire state at the time because of a fall. “Do not grieve,” Rasputin continued in his note to Alexandra. “The little one will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much.” When Alexis’s hemorrhaging stopped the next day, the empress became Rasputin’s devoted disciple. He became a royal family intimate, continuing to minister to Alexis while gradually wielding more and more influence on the imperial government. Empress Alexandra, whom he called “Mama,” was his champion, and often bombarded her husband with Rasputin’s ideas and suggestions. She refused to see her savior’s dark side.

Rasputin had always had an enormous appetite for women, which, despite his ascetic persona, he never hesitated to satisfy—by force, if necessary. His name, in fact, means “dissolute” in Russian. He earned it as a young man in his native village and never sought to change it. As his power and influence at court expanded, so did his sex life. And plenty of women in the higher social circles were willing to entertain him, attracted not only by his mysterious aura and access to the throne, but also by the novelty of sleeping with a brutish, unwashed peasant. “He had too many offers,” noted his secretary Simanovich. Flushed with success, Rasputin even tried to bed Tsar Nicholas’s own sister and bragged (falsely) of deflowering the tsar’s daughters.

Despite his unsavory reputation, the empress refused to believe anything bad about him. “Saints are always calumniated,” she said. “He is hated because we love him.” Nothing could convince her that the man in whom she put all her trust, who seemed to control her son’s deadly hemophilia, was a fraud whose influence was feeding the widespread and dangerous resentment that would eventually culminate in revolution.

“Rasputin was a Janus,” Basil Shulgin, a member of the Duma, later wrote. “To the Imperial family he had turned his face as a humble
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and, looking at it, the Empress cannot but be convinced that the spirit of God rests upon this man. And to the country he has turned the beastly, drunken unclean face of a bald satyr from Tobolsk. Here we have the key to it all. The country is indignant that such a man should be received under the Tsar’s roof. And under the roof there is bewilderment and a sense of bitter hurt. Why should they all be enraged? That a saintly man came to pray over the unhappy Heir, a desperately sick child whose least imprudent movement may end in death? So the Tsar and the Empress are hurt and indignant. Why should there be such a storm? The man has done nothing but good. Thus a messenger of death has placed himself between the throne and the nation. . . . And because of the man’s fateful duality, understood by neither [Tsar nor people], neither side can understand the other. So the Tsar and his people, however apart, are leading each other to the edge of the abyss.”

Ignoring the mounting discontent, Alexandra kept Rasputin by her side, heeding his advice and passing along “Our Friend’s” ministrations to the tsar. Prime ministers rose and fell at Rasputin’s whim, and when Russia entered the war in 1914, he was instrumental in the fall of Grand Duke Nicholas, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian armies, who hated him. “The Grand Duke is deliberately currying favor in the army and overshadowing the Tsar so that one day he can claim the throne,” Rasputin told the empress, poisoning her against his enemy. “The Grand Duke cannot possibly succeed on the battlefield because God will not bless him. How can God bless a man who has turned his back on me, the Man of God? In all probability, if the Grand Duke is allowed to keep his power, he will kill me, and then what will happen to the Tsarevich, the Tsar, and Russia?”

Fearing the spreading hatred and discontent Rasputin was generating, members of the extended royal family begged the empress to part with him. She refused, even in the face of numerous reports that she had taken Rasputin as her lover. When her sister Elizabeth, the wife of the tsar’s assassinated Uncle Serge, tried to intervene, Alexandra cut her off coldly. “Perhaps it would have been better if I had not come,” Elizabeth said sadly as she prepared to depart. “Yes,” was all the empress replied. The sisters never saw one another again. There was, however, one member of the nobility who was not so easily dismissed. Prince Felix Yussoupov, the richest man in Russia and the tsar’s nephew by marriage, wanted Rasputin dead. His efforts to that end resulted in a macabre comedy of errors.

After luring Rasputin to the basement of his palace, Yussoupov plied him with poisoned cakes which were supposed to kill him instantly. They didn’t. Instead, Rasputin asked for some wine to wash down the cakes. The wine was also poisoned. After gulping two glasses, Rasputin was still standing, asking Yussoupov to play his guitar and sing for him. “My head swam,” the frustrated killer would later say of this unexpected twist, as he played one song after the other while Rasputin merrily clapped along. After two hours of entertaining his quarry, Yussoupov was desperate. Excusing himself, he rushed upstairs to consult with his fellow conspirators. One handed him a revolver to finish off Rasputin, who was downstairs calling for more wine. When his host returned, the death-defying monk suggested a visit to the Gypsies for sex—“With God in thought, but mankind in the flesh,” he said with a wink. Yussoupov instead led him to a cabinet containing an ornate crucifix. Rasputin remarked that he liked the cabinet better than the cross, to which Yussoupov replied, “You’d far better look at the crucifix and say a prayer.” With that, he pulled out the revolver and shot him in the back. Rasputin fell onto the white bearskin rug with a scream, while the other conspirators rushed into the room. One of them, a doctor (the same doctor who had assured Yussoupov that there was enough poison in the cakes to kill an army), felt for Rasputin’s pulse and declared him dead.